Cash Transfers and Employment among Syrian Refugees: Evidence from Rule-Based Eligibility in Türkiye

Freeha Fatima, Efsan Ozen and Dhushyanth Raju
Additional contact information
Freeha Fatima: World Bank
Efsan Ozen: World Bank

No 18670, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: We examine whether eligibility for a large-scale humanitarian cash transfer program affects employment outcomes among displaced populations. Exploiting deterministic demographic thresholds governing eligibility for the Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) in Türkiye, a nationwide unconditional cash transfer program established primarily to support Syrian refugees, we implement a local-randomization regression discontinuity design to estimate causal effects at the program’s administrative eligibility frontier. We find no statistically significant discontinuities in employment probabilities for either women or men across multiple employment outcomes, including overall employment, wage employment, full-time employment, and nonfarm employment. Estimated effects are small, economically modest, and stable across specifications. Overall, the findings provide little evidence that sustained unconditional cash transfers under the ESSN generated economically meaningful labor supply disincentives at the eligibility margin.

Keywords: unconditional cash transfers; refugees; labor supply; social assistance; regression discontinuity; rule-based eligibility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 F22 H53 I38 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp18670.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18670

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Fallak ().